Physician payment website due for more outages, and other briefs

Modern Healthcare

  • The troubled Open Payments website is encountering a bit more turbulence. The CMS announced last week that it plans upcoming outages for the site and that downtime would be used for “scheduled maintenance upgrades.” As a result, the review-and-dispute process for doctor data displayed on the site will be extended until Sept. 10, the agency said. That delay will push the corrections period to Sept. 25. The agency still says that the data will be released to the public Sept. 30. The outages are scheduled on Aug. 30 between 1 and 11 a.m. ET and on Sept. 5 for an as-yet-undisclosed duration.

  • The White House last week confirmed that Todd Park will be departing as U.S. chief technology officer and turning to a new governmental role. The announcement came in a White House blog post. In September, Park will move to California, where he will be recruiting technology talent to the federal government as well as “identifying innovative ways to improve the quality of government digital services.” Park helped turn around HealthCare.gov. Before that, he had been a serial entrepreneur who co-founded two public health IT companies: Athenahealth, which provides cloud-based electronic health records, and Castlight, which provides price transparency for consumers.

  • Spending on Medicare and Medicaid is expected to be roughly $100 billion less than previously anticipated over the next decade, in large part because of reductions in the cost of labor and medical services, according to the latest analysis from the Congressional Budget Office. Medicare spending is anticipated to be $71 billion less than previously projected, while Medicaid spending is expected to drop by $31 billion. But overall healthcare spending is still anticipated to rise by $67 billion in 2014, a 9% increase. That's driven in large part by the expansion of Medicaid, with spending on the program expected to increase by $40 billion, or 15%, over 2014.
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